Saturday, September 19, 2015

South Park: Stunning and Brave

IMO they pulled some punches in this episode, but it was still pretty great, as usual. It's crazy how thoroughly the bizarre PC orthodoxy about this stuff seems to have taken over, at least in the media, social and otherwise. Given a perfect opportunity to point out that 'she' is not obviously the correct pronoun to use to refer to Caitlyn Jenner, SP largely caves and, in a 2-second bit of business, Stan gets Kyle to grudgingly change his off-handed 'he' to a 'she.' I don't have any interest in PC-esque pronoun-policing...but, linguistically speaking, 'he' is clearly correct and 'she' is incorrect in the case of Jenner. Jenner is male, and 'he' is the pronoun to refer to males in English. PCs are trying to obfuscate this point in various ways, but those are the facts. I don't see why anyone would want to insist on that point for most ordinary purposes...but nobody's doing so. The people who are being insistent are the people who are insisting that people use the incorrect pronoun 'she.' And an overarching principle of my position on this stuff is: do what you want and say what you want, but don't insist that false things are true, and absolutely don't try to force others to say and believe things that are at least controversial and probably false. You want to believe that Jenner is a woman? Ok. Not true...but people believe all sorts of false things. And of course you're also free to express your (false) view. But you're not free to harangue others in an effort to browbeat them into mouthing falsehoods. It's like believing in Jesus. Do what you want, man. But don't expect to drag me to epistemic perdition too...
More substantively, South Parkdidn't take on the Big Lie in play here, i.e. that Jenner is a woman. Reflect on that. Here's a falsehood that has, in about a year, become so entrenched as orthodoxy that even South Park is (apparently) afraid to take it on. That, IMO, should give everyone pause.